infolibre

Friday, January 25, 2002

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Australia Ad Lib, an interactive guide to the wild, the weird and the vernacular in Australian music:

These pages feature a selection of the most iconoclastic, larrikin, do-it-yourself performers working in Australia today. The mind numbing mediocrity offered up by the global- music-mart can’t be avoided; but while using this archive it can temporarily be ignored. We’ve gone for the radical, the un-compromised and the often unheard music; the stuff that gets swept under the mainstream carpet.

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

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"People forget that radio really is the most ubiquitous, the most accessible of all media in the world. And it is the most democratic in its dissemination and in its access, in enabling people to have a voice." - Bill Siemering

Common Groundprofiles the community radio projects NPR veteran Siemering has assisted in South Africa, Mongolia and Macedonia. Also interesting is this show, the second half of which details peace activism via radio in Burundi (both links should connect you directly to a Real Audio file.)

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An excerpt from the Battery Radio documentary "The Power of the Unemployed," which explores what records from the archives of the Ontario police reveal about the Canadian labor struggles of the 1930s and 1990s.

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

In this paper the results of research on the role of a virtual community during wartime are presented. A virtual community within the Belgrade-based online system, SezamPro, was explored in the periods before, during and after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. This research found that the community had gone through significant changes during the War, including a) number of participants increased; b) users spent much more time online; and, c) reason for communicating changed dramatically. During war, online efforts focused on information gathering, social interaction and the expression of political opinions. In a period of crisis strong interpersonal relationships were established within the studied online group. Furthermore, in such state of affairs the Internet became an important source of information.

A growing movement to make the American mass media more accountable to the public they are supposed to serve has won an enormous victory. At a three-day meeting on January 11 to 13, which drew hundreds of political activists and radio producers from throughout the nation, a newly installed interim board of directors of the five-station Pacifica Radio network ordered the reinstatement of nearly 40 producers who had been fired during a political struggle that consumed the network. The new board also immediately replaced several key executives who had sought to transform the 50-year-old progressive radio network into a mini-version of National Public Radio . . .

Monday, January 21, 2002

This is not your average newsroom. For one thing, it's been set up in a church basement. On one desk, a top-of-the line G4 Mac hums along; on another, a salvaged computer tossed in the trash by a college student is being brought back to life by the tech department.

Like any media operation, it's busy. Deadline pressure permeates the air. Editors and writers call back and forth to each other, sweating the details of story length and content. Someone gets up to make a coffee run . . .

Welcome to the Independent Media Center, in this case, the Philly operation-headquartered for the moment at the Calvary Church in West Philadelphia.